phpbb doing a major 301 redirection

PhpBB is the biggest community board application available. I am big fan of phpBB as I understand almost all the modules and have tweaked as per our need. From the personalized url to different templates for different post. Special quick replies, integration with other systems e.t.c. We always failed to do the proper documentation to release any module to the phpBB. I have tried phpbb 3.0 beta, which has an amazing user management system (which was missing till now).

As you might have noticed that phpBB site was down for last one or two days with the following message,

Ouch! RAID array failureâ€¦

Weâ€™re sad to announce that during the switch of a failed harddisk to the hot-spare and the planned 2 hours required for the array to re-sync, weâ€™ve been hit by an extremely unexpected double-disk failure which leaves us with a dead array.

Within this step we also updated the main forums to phpBB3 Olympus as well as using the new phpBB default style, named prosilver.

Some of the new sections that I liked,

Author’s images to right, giving content more importance than the author. It is a debatable topic but for forums like phpbb it is a good move. I liked the template.

/phpBB/ url change to /community/, very good move. Case sensitive phpBB url was an hindrance for natural communication tools WOM.

301 redirections
What happens to existing urls with /phpBB/ in it? Now there is a 301 redirection happening for such url, see an example www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=407112. It will be interesting to watch how Google, Yahoo and MSN reacts to the changes. I am keeping a watch over the whole scene including the ranking for some of the pages.